Impasse Hotel Syria - photographs by Krass Clement

Impasse Hotel Syria
- photographs by Krass Clement

May 3rd to October 22nd, 2017

See a short tv-interview in Danish with the artist, Krass Clement, and Peter Wandel from the David Collection, from May 1st in the program “Dagen” on DR2 here.

Krass Clement, Syria 2001

The special exhibition Impasse Hotel Syria – photographs by Krass Clement presents pictures taken in 2001 during a trip to Syria, where the artist visited the cities of Damascus, Palmyra, Deir ez-Zur, Homs, and Aleppo.

The motifs are snapshots from a reality that now, 16 years later, no longer exists. Developed in shades between black and white, we see people in the process of carrying out life’s many activities. A girl is hiding behind some sandals in a shoe store; a man is squinting in a train car. Somewhere in a city, a woman stops on her way down the stairs and looks back.

Pulsating everyday life is not the only thing that the camera has captured, however. So is a curious stagnation. Streets and sidewalks are dusty and bumpy; cables and wires hang loose. Most shop signs are from days gone by, just like the cars and policemen’s uniforms. The same timeless portraits of the country’s president or the president before him – his father – are omnipresent in windows and on walls.

Krass Clement is a poetical photographer. This is obvious to anyone who has seen even a small selection of his many pictures from a 40-year career. The photographs from Syria are also a form of poetry. They invariably bring to mind the present and the current catastrophe, especially in Aleppo, but they also lead us to something else. They hurt and soothe, as only art can.

The exhibition presents 58 of the nearly 200 photographs that are collected in the book of the same name, Impasse Hotel Syria, published by Gyldendal in 2016 with a grant from the C. L. David Foundation and Collection.

On September 20th at 19.00, Krass Clement will give a lecture in Danish entitled “Krass Clement – behind the camera” in the museum’s cultural program, David’s Bazaar. Tickets cost DKR 50 and will be on sale from the end of August. A number of free guided tours of the exhibition will be offered in the course of the autumn.

The exhibition will run from May 3rd to October 22nd. A small catalogue can be bought in the museum shop for DKR 30. An exhibition catalogue can be bought for DKR 40.